Nicholas Irving, a former special-operations sniper and an author, rates Pedro Pascal's skills in "The Last of Us" S1E5 (2023) for realism.
Irving was a special-operations sniper in the 3rd Ranger Battalion for the US Army. He is known as The Reaper for his 33 confirmed kills in Afghanistan in less than four months. He is the author of multiple nonfiction and fiction books, including his most recent novel, "Reaper: The BOARD."
Irving was a special-operations sniper in the 3rd Ranger Battalion for the US Army. He is known as The Reaper for his 33 confirmed kills in Afghanistan in less than four months. He is the author of multiple nonfiction and fiction books, including his most recent novel, "Reaper: The BOARD."
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00:00 My name's Nicholas Irving.
00:01 I'm a former US Army Ranger Special Operations Sniper.
00:04 I'm also known as the Reaper for my 33 confirmed kills
00:08 in Afghanistan.
00:09 Today, I'm back again to look at some more sniper scenes
00:12 from TV and film and judge how real they are.
00:15 We don't know if the sniper truly sucked that bad
00:26 or his scope was just, like, not calibrated.
00:28 It wasn't zeroed properly.
00:30 He might have just faulty ammunition.
00:32 There's a lot of factors that go into that.
00:34 To stay still when you're pinned down by a sniper,
00:37 it's like almost a death wish.
00:40 It's just a matter of time before he's
00:42 going to figure something out to make those bullets impact.
00:45 Running zigzag patterns, getting out as fast as you can
00:48 is probably your best bet.
00:49 That's the only way me and my reconnaissance team,
00:52 when we were pinned down by an enemy sniper,
00:55 we had to get up and run away.
00:58 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:01 To prevent an enemy coming in to do what just happened here,
01:07 sneak up behind you.
01:08 In sniper school, they teach you no more than, like, two shots.
01:12 Two or three shots, your sniper hide is burnt.
01:15 You would want to move, ideally, to a new location.
01:19 Once you have a good sniper hide set up,
01:20 the odds of you, like, getting out after that second shot,
01:24 third shot, it's slim.
01:25 But there are countermeasures to deter people
01:29 from entering that sniper hide.
01:31 Like, for us, we might put up a claymore or some booby
01:34 traps or something like that behind us.
01:37 And even a guy with a machine gun
01:39 is usually watching our back.
01:41 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:44 It actually wasn't too bad.
01:48 And it's at nighttime with no night vision,
01:50 so I'll give them that.
01:52 We hit targets at nighttime.
01:55 But the distances are extremely close.
01:57 We had a sniper scope that was mounted with a PVS-14,
02:02 I believe, which is a night vision attachment that goes
02:06 on the front of your scope.
02:07 [GUNSHOTS]
02:10 Bolt guns, bolt rifles, they jam all the time,
02:15 especially in, like, dusty conditions.
02:17 That bolt gun, when you pull it back,
02:19 it's exposed to the elements.
02:22 And it's such a slower process, as opposed
02:24 to, like, a semi-automatic, where the bolt is coming back
02:26 extremely fast.
02:27 So it's more prone to collect dust and things of that nature
02:32 that would cause it to jam up.
02:34 Man, this is getting tough.
02:36 I don't know.
02:37 I'd give it a six, because realistically,
02:40 shooting at nighttime like that, I could see you missing that
02:43 much.
02:43 My favorite sniper scene of all time
02:47 would have to be from the movie "Lone Survivor."
02:50 They had their sniper rifle, and they were engaging targets
02:53 in the woods.
02:54 And that was, like, the most realistic war scene
02:57 I have ever seen in my life.
02:59 [AUDIO OUT]
03:03 [BLANK_AUDIO]